Football simulation card game machines have been well known as card game machines which use cards as play items. With this card game machine, when a game player sets player cards on a card placement panel, an image sensor inside the machine reads out data recorded on the back side of the cards to generate data of football players who will form a team so that the game is started. The player can give instructions on the position or formation of the football players by changing the arrangement of the player cards. The players of such card games can take pleasure in collecting cards such as the player cards they can use in the card games.
The invention disclosed in Patent Document 1 below proposes one such card game machine as described above.
The card game machine described in Patent Document 1 is a machine which executes the football simulation card game described above. Disclosed in Patent Document 1 is that a new player card is issued from a card issuing unit of the card game machine when a game ends, so that the game player can have one more player card each time a game ends, which enables the game player in a next game to select or replace the football players more easily using the newly obtained player cards.
In amusement arcades or the like, there are provided a variety of game machines including video games other than card game machines. These game machines are required to improve the occupancy rate and increase the profit of the amusement arcade, and to make the game players to wish to continue the games, i.e., to provide “interesting” game contents. Patent Document 2 below describes an invention which proposes a game machine for solving these problems.
The video game machine proposed in Patent Document 2 includes fee collecting means for collecting a predetermined game fee from a player, game operating means for starting a game from one of different game stages and for displaying game screens on the monitor, game results rating means for rating the game results at the end of a game, and fee setting means for setting a fee for a next continued game based on the ratings. Further disclosed in Patent Document 2 is that the game results rating means permits the player to play a continued game to a next game stage at a discount rate if the results at the end of the game satisfies a certain level.
Patent Document 1: Japanese unexamined Patent Publication No. 2002-301264 (P. 15-17 of the Specification and FIG. 26)
Patent Document 2: Japanese unexamined Patent Publication No. Hei 6-304333 (P. 3-6 of the Specification and FIGS. 3 and 5)